Stolen Youth

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Mac Miller and Vince Staples’ 2013 mixtape, an important document of two artists sparking fire in each other.

Mac Miller got the idea for rap camp from The Alchemist but he made it his own. A bunch of folks from all corners of his life, from fellow Pittsburgh acts like Hardo and Bill to old tourmates like the Cool Kids to his new circle of Los Angeles artists, would come in for freestyle sessions at his home recording studio, The Sanctuary. When Mac opened the doors to his mansion, anything could happen.

In 2012, accompanying Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples showed up to rap camp and Mac asked him why he didn’t rap more. Vince told him he was never offered beats, so Mac stepped in as Larry Fisherman, his producer alias. “We made a couple songs and it just went from there,” Vince once recalled with typical understatement.

At the time, Vince and Mac were both adjusting to the whiplash of growing up too fast. Mac was a surprise indie success living it up in his new home of L.A. Obsessed with being a rapper throughout his adolescence, he went from sneaking out of his house at 15 to attend cyphers, to headlining a tour at 19, to moving into a mansion at 20. By 21, he was so committed to music that, bizarrely, a reality show about his music career, Mac Miller and the Most Dope Family, was an escape. “I have been living in my studio for months working on my album, so the show kind of forced me to get out of that room and go do something entertaining,” he said.

Vince was trying to escape his reality. When he entered The Sanctuary he was a high school dropout and former Long Beach gangbanger whose relationship to music was transactional and tenuous. “I needed money, bruh. Ain’t nobody have no money around me,” he once reflected of that time period. “My mama needed some money. My sisters needed money. Somebody got to take care of my family.” By 18, he’d already weathered the deaths and incarcerations of multiple friends and relatives and was thoroughly jaded even as rap offered a way forward. He didn’t hide his cynicism. “Abraham Lincoln never kept none of my niggas safe/Only gave them prison dates and Church’s Chicken dinner plates,” he scoffed on his debut mixtape.

Stolen Youth emerged from Mac and Vince’s untested potential. At the time, Vince was defined by a show-stealing but narrow verse on Earl Sweatshirt’s “epar,” a rep that was intensified by Earl’s unknown enrollment at Samoa’s Coral Reef Academy. Vince was frequently asked about Earl’s whereabouts and pestered to release more music in the vile vein of Earl’s debut mixtape. He refused.

Meanwhile, Mac felt constrained by his most popular music in a different way. His success had made him the poster child for frat rap, a genre of trifling white-boy fantasia that he was adjacent to but quickly outpacing. If you listened closely, his music was shedding its kegger appeal and shifting into something foggier and more introspective—but he was still this grinning white kid who fit in well the frat pack he was lumped in with. As he insisted he was something more, it was easy to doubt him. “People weren’t really taking Mac seriously as a producer. It’s the same way they look at me as a rapper,” Vince once summarized. Despite their different backgrounds, Mac and Vince were united in their resolve to surpass what was expected of them.

Teaming up was formally Mac’s idea, but the ambient spontaneity of rap camp allowed Stolen Youth to take shape intuitively. With no particular direction, it blossomed into Vince’s first real self-portrait. Shedding the deadpan of his first two mixtapes, which were sharply written but withdrawn and cold, Vince emerges as a dramatist and storyteller. He remains jaded but begins to sound lucid, his grim outlook bolstered by his eye for detail. His rocky childhood isn’t some distant memory; its lessons and losses are embedded in his worldview.

What’s dazzling is that instead of a linear autobiography, Vince opts for a scattered personal history. His tales are specific and oblique, rejecting a bird’s eye view for a perspective that’s intimate and clipped. Gunshots are so common he can distinguish between the “cry” of a .357 and the “applause” of a Mac-10. His 9 millimeter is “chunky,” and his shotgun shells can be caught from 50 yards away like a Roddy White completion. The Buick LeSabre is black and lacks plates; you probably don’t want to drive it down Orizaba Avenue because that’s where the undercovers park. Vince uses these details less as markers of his authenticity and more as private recollections. He isn’t a Long Beach tour guide; he’s a resident whose inner life is reified in the physical world.

Within this whirlwind of memories, time and space melt away, blurring the line between kid Vince and adult Vince. In his “Heavens” verse, he evokes mall cops and real cops in the same breath; he ran from both. Other times, they were nowhere to be found. In the middle of matter-of-factly describing a driveby on “Intro,” he pivots to describing a dead friend lying in the street for hours: “First the Goodyears screech, then you hear that drum/Fuck 911, police don't come/Had Jabari on the streets till the sun came up.” On “Stuck in My Ways,” he questions religion by observing that he’s spent his life “sinning without a consequence,” but then flips that doubt into defiance: “We made the most out the nothing they give us.” It feels like both a sneer and a sigh. Like his memories, his cynicism and his resolve sit side by side.

While Vince raps in 4K, Larry goes Technicolor. Larry Fisherman was a persona Mac created because he felt the Mac Miller identity came with too many expectations. As Larry Fisherman, Mac is curious, fastidious, and semi-anonymous. He plays new instruments and embraces the toil of starting from scratch. “I know I’m not shit,” he once said of his burgeoning skill set as a producer. He clearly thought of that inexperience as an opportunity. For Stolen Youth, he pulls widely, drawing from trip-hop, cloud rap, and boom bap to produce beats that are feathery yet grim, woozy yet swingy. The drums kick, knock, flutter, and splat. Vocal samples, some of Mac himself (as on “Thought About You”), are stretched into dreamy yawns and clipped into gloomy loops. The flourishes and diversity of his composition profoundly outclass his rapping during this period. While an aimless Mac Miller rapped that he wanted to “make out with Foxy Brown,” Larry Fisherman was screwing Willie Hutch vocals from the Foxy Brown soundtrack. Mac’s rapping would eventually catch up with Larry’s production long before his death last year, but here the gap is instructive. Larry was who Mac wanted to be.

Larry’s versatility helps buoy Vince’s then-flat voice, which had yet to become the manic Swiss army knife it is today. The chorus of “Thought About You” features well-placed blasts of drumrolls that sound like a carburetor roaring to life. Vince’s hook comes alive, too. Similarly, the gusts of bass and distortion that shoot through the dancing minor keys on “Fantoms” hit like car collisions, giving Vince’s taunts a boost of intensity. These assists could turn corny—as on the goofy key-pounding of “Guns & Roses” and the shock waves of organ on “Sleep”—but they embody the spirit of Mac’s rap camp. The goal was to muddle the lines between work and play, collaborating and goofing off.

Vince had greater ambitions than rapping for fun. You can feel it on the posse cuts “Heaven” and “Sleep,” where Vince is joined by Da$h, Mac Miller, Ab-Soul, and Hardo for what are essentially cyphers. On both tracks, he goes last, wresting all the showboating into something more purposeful and sharp. This disconnect extended to the record as a whole. “Stolen Youth isn’t me,” he’s said, citing his manager, Corey Smyth, and Mac as the real masterminds. The Boondocks-esque cover art (and accompanying comic book) certainly don’t make this sound like a mere change of heart. He made the record that circumstance allowed.

When everyone else retires to their cabins and it’s just Vince and Mac and the music, the tape shines. “On Outro,” backed by twinkly chords, splashes of kick drum, and a purr of bass, Vince’s rapping is effortless and graceful, flitting between images, memories, and taunts. The hookless, free-flowing song has no centerpiece, but it does have this striking vignette: “Mama playing Stevie Wonder while she in the kitchen cooking/Pigs knocking on my door to take my dad to central booking/Reading books up in my room cause she won’t let me go and play/Scared her youngest son will run around and go pick up a K.” The scene is vivid and compact and dense, a cross-section of life that’s as personal as it is panoramic.

That kind of piercing clarity is what makes Stolen Youth so enduring despite its shortcomings. Though Vince has outgrown the tape, his life fills it crags, his experiences guide its voice, his temerity forges something from nothing. He went on to take the raw talent on display here and become an aesthete, but even without the gloss and resources, his perspective is fully formed and resonant. At a wizened 19, Vince sees the abusers of power and privilege and is poised to confront them, already unconvinced of their authority. He’s not a rebel with a middle finger and an attitude, nor some kid prodigy with a god complex. He’s not a gangster rapper, nor is he a reformed gangster. He’s just Vince Staples, the griot of Long Beach, and Mac Miller is his friend.